I was in the countryside the other day, the New Forest as it happens, and I bumped into a bunch of people wearing hats and shorts and cameras in a Land Rover. They were foreigners, it turns out, from all over – Tanzania, Madagascar, the Galapagos islands, Costa Rica, Canada – and they were there to see the ponies, and the rabbits. And possibly, if they were very lucky, a grass snake. And obviously I'm making this up – all of it; I wasn't even in the New Forest. But if I had been, I almost certainly wouldn't have seen any safari-ing foreigners (or grass snakes). Because, apart from our seabird colonies perhaps, British wildlife can't really compete at an international level. It's all a bit small, and brown.

It's ours, though, so celebrate it we must. And that means we can't just point a camera at it and then put it on the telly. We have to be more imaginative.

Which is what Chris Packham is doing with The Animal's Guide to Britain (BBC2). He's trying to see the place from the creatures' point of view. "What I want to know is what they think of Britain, what matters to them," he says. "That's my mission, to see the UK through our animals' eyes."

So not moles then, obviously. But ospreys, which circle over the water, looking down, until they see a fish, then bam, in they go, feet first, splashdown. What a way to go for the trout; one minute you're just doing your trouty thing in your nice cool loch, then you're suddenly grabbed from above by massive razor-sharp talons, snatched into a world you didn't even know existed, and torn to pieces (mmm, shredded trout) at the top of a tree.

OK, so that is impressive. Well, it is until Chris tells us that this loch is actually a fish farm. That's like shooting fish in a barrel, isn't it, almost literally. And the ospreys still only get a fish one in four times. No wonder they died out completely for a while.

This first episode is about everything connected to fresh water. So we've got dragonflies, which are also impressive, especially in larva form when they have double-hinged killer death jaws to impale their prey on. Cool. And then water voles, as in Ratty in Wind in the Willows, fluffy little balls of cuteness that jump into streams with a little plop. They've come perilously close to extinction recently. Whose fault is that? The Americans obviously – American minks, more specifically. They come over here, they eat our voles . . . A lot of the blame lies with animal rights people too, for liberating the minks from the fur farms. Bloody idiots.

Some of the through-the-animals'-eyes stuff – what matters to them in Britain – is pretty obvious really. What matters to them is that they have a place that has all the right things for them to breed – plenty to eat (and served up to them on a plate, in the ospreys' case), and not too many nasty foreign beasties eating them. What's nice, though, are the little animated pieces about how these creatures fit in with our history and culture. In the olden days, for example, dragonflies – devil's darning needles – used to sew closed the mouths of men who cussed and women who talked back. It's a shame they don't do that any more. And beaver testicles were used as pain killers, like natural ibuprofen. It's almost enough to put you off having a headache; mmm, two big chewy beaver bollocks, four times a day, with a glass of water. Fascinating. I like Packham too, he has a twinkle, a naughtiness, a bit of wit, which you don't get with Kate Fumble.

And maybe our fauna isn't so bad after all. It's still not very big (a vole plopping into a stream is hardly 100,000 wildebeests stampeding across the river with the snapping crocodiles). Or very colourful – voles are brown, except in Scotland, where they're black. But it's still good when you get up close and personal. That's what really makes the difference: technology – the slowed-down stuff, the close-ups of the killer dragonfly larvae, the amazing underwater footage of an osprey taking out a flatfish (surely dead, and placed strategically in front of the camera). It certainly makes it better than some of the old footage on show here, when British wildlife tended to be distant specks.

It's also better than anything you'd see if you actually went out there yourself, with your binoculars. So no need to go to the New Forest. Yay.